Game Dev is Difficult

Hello fellow sleuths! I've been continuing on my version of Project Midnight and it feels like things just continue to get more and more difficult... Allow me to explain.

The big project I've been working on for the last few days is with the text for dialogue. I ran into several issues with the visuals of the text when going from windowed mode to fullscreen, but managed to fix it by altering the original sprite font file.

For those wondering, a sprite font is used when you want to guarantee a typeface will be available and used in your game instead of using a text option and having to import typefaces and fonts. For my version of Project Midnight, I wanted to try and make it as accurate as possible. That meant redrawing every alphabetical and numerical character that is used in the Nancy Drew games. To give you an example of what I mean, HeR Interactive used to do this exact method with the early Nancy Drew games:

This is one of the sprite fonts from Nancy Drew: Message in a Haunted Mansion.

Just like everything in game dev, there's pros and cons to sprite fonts vs regular fonts. The best part is how customizable it is. It visually makes your game look very unique and there's a sense of pride that comes with successfully creating a sprite font. The downside can be having to program it. Unlike an imported font, the developer must signify how each character is outlined, what the width is of each character, how many characters there are, and so on.

Going back to the original point, when I put my game into windowed mode, the sprite font looked perfect. It was crisp, well-spaced, and felt just like the original. However, when it entered fullscreen mode, these weird lines started showing up and making the text look really gross. Click on the image below to get a closer look.

After doing some research and asking around on the game engine's forum, I found out that the original sprite font I made wasn't spaced correctly and needed to be redrawn. So for a couple hours today, I turned on a podcast, sat down in photoshop and redrew all 85 characters, numbers, and symbols. It was definitely a bit laborious, but the end result is perfect. Having updated the pixel spacing around each character and adding several more symbols compared to the previous sprite font made things so much better than before. Now, the sprite font works incredibly in fullscreen. I won't share any other behind the scenes images at the moment, but I can guarantee I will share a lot more in the future.

Oh yeah, I also uploaded 3 more episodes of SCKR with Arglefumph:

That about wraps up today's post. Until next time, detectives!

Huw